new blog-thing!

self/fashion

To the Editor of the New York Times:

Re: The articles "Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Humans Seek the Keys to It" and "Pas de Deux of Sexuality is Written in the Genes" (Science Times; April 10, 2007).

As a PhD student focusing on literature and sexuality, I find it deeply distressing that a group of articles purporting to describe the newest developments in research on human sexuality manages, through its near-exclusive focus on evolutionary psychology/biology, to uphold the oldest of stereotypes about men and women (aggressive vs. passive, straightforward vs. capricious), heterosexuality and homosexuality - an aberration, "evolutionarily maladaptive", according to the latter article's cited "expert", Dr. J. Michael Bailey.

The alleged neutrality of such research is belied by the desperately convoluted arguments it puts forth to maintain its dubious paradigms - women's bodies have "adapted" to be constantly rape-able; gays are either the genetic residue of extra-fertile heterosexuals or the result of attacks in the womb from "anti-male antibodies". It quickly start to sound less like curious rationality than a fantasia of heterosexual-male lust and paranoia. And, ironically, quite resistant to any real evolution in approach or interpretation.

Minimal research reveals that this Dr. Bailey (whose claim that male bisexuality does not exist was given prominent, and much protested, coverage by the Times in 2005) is a very controversial figure within the scientific as well as the gay/trans communities; he and his circle of affiliates (several of whom, including Meredith Chivers and Ray Blanchard, also show up in these articles) are proponents of a set of highly contested - and, to many, erroneous and even dangerous - ideas about gender and sexuality. The Times consistently, unpardonably fails to mention any of this throughout its bizarrely obsessive coverage of evolutionary psychology; and likewise fails to attend to the many other approaches to the study sexuality in fields from literature to neurology, nearly all of them more supple and sustainable than this one.

[This is really fucked up. I've got lots more to say about it - but I'm saving it for the sensational exposé of the Times' longstanding affiliation with this group of supersketchy, quasi-eugenicist "scientists" that I plan to write next month...after I finish my oral exams, which are in...a week and a half (!!)]

latkes

[-I’m thinking that maybe I’ll try making latkes.
-Well, that would be nice.
-I don’t know how though!
-It’s not very complicated, you can find a recipe on the internet.
-Yeah but Mom, I want them to taste like yours!
-Ok, well, let’s see. For how many people? Just the three of you?
-Yeah, I think. Maybe a few more.
-You don’t want to be doing this for a big group. You’ll be at the stove for hours.
-I know, it’s just a few.
-You’re going to smell like oil for days.]

4 potatoes
(carrot or sweet potato for color)
you don’t need to peel them if the skin is thin
onion
Cut the potatoes into small pieces
Shredder blade

[-Do you have a food processor? You don’t want to be grating all of those potatoes.
-Yeah, we do, remember my roommates got married?
-Right. That’s good. Some people say it’s better to grate them, but it’s not worth it.
-Do you grate them?
-No.]

Squeeze water out

[-I don’t understand how you would squeeze the water out.
-Well, you have to do it with your two hands. In handfuls.
-Won’t that take forever?
-You just have to do it. Otherwise they’ll be mushy. Just do it handful by handful.
-Ok.]

Add salt and pepper
Add 2 eggs
(Make sure you have enough salt)

[-I don’t know if I will be able to cook them right!
-Well, there are all kinds of ways to do it, some people like them thicker and some people like them thinner.
-Mom, you know I want them like yours!
-Well I’m not there!
-I know! But I want them thin and kind of crispy! Like yours!
-Well, ok, then, you have to flatten them in the pan.
-I hate it when they’re thick.
-No, it’s not as good.]

Frying pan with oil
heat on medium
Put in spoonfuls, flatten, brown on each side
(make sure to cook them long enough on each side)
Keep in oven

[-And apple sauce and sour cream. You need those. Do you have them?
-We’re going to get them.
-Well you have to have apple sauce and sour cream!
-I know!]

Apple sauce
Sour cream

[-I have to fry mine now. Good luck! I'm sure you'll be fine.]

thanks, mom.

this is the toast

That I gave at my roommates' [C] and [T]'s wedding on Saturday night. There is much, much more to say about the beautiful, beautiful event; but for now, I will say, other than it was beautiful, that I was editin this toast up until about ten mintutes (maybe five) before I was supposed to give it, and that I was having an panic attack more intense than any I have experienced in recent memory. So much that we thought that [info]mikeynobody's usual symptoms had been transferred to me, and he did his best to treat them.

But it went really well. As everything did; as everything did, perfectly, as much as that is possible, really.

---

Because – fortunately! – [C] and [T] chose not to have a sit-down dinner, with seating assignments and placecards and all that awkward stuff, at their reception, I don’t know if any of you had the chance to see them eat their dinner. I’m lucky enough to have seen them eat dinner – and brunch and lunch and random 3pm and 3am snacks – many times, and each time I’m reminded what a wonderfully strange couple they are: because [C] and [T] have to eat exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. At a restaurant, they can never, ever, each order their own dishes, but rather have to choose two to share, and then eat precisely the same amount of each at precisely the same speed. And if there’s a bit of leftover cake in the fridge, they’ll spend all day debating when to take it out and share it, with one fork and equal bites. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I’m so happy to be here celebrating their marriage because they do things like that; and because they’ve let me into their lives to see it. There are so many people for whom being in a couple entails some kind of closing off from other people, other relationships; and I always imagined that watching a best friend – as [C] has truly become over the past two years or so that I’ve known her – get married would feel, though of course happy, also like something of a loss. But when [T] came into [C]’s life, I didn’t lose anything, but rather gained a new best friend; and now I’m not even losing a roommate, but instead getting a new one.

Their love, and this marriage, reaches outward; it’s open, and generous, and expansive; it takes in their families and their friends, the new friends they’ve made together and the old friends they’ve shared with each other.

Together, the three of us have stayed up late quietly reading or loudly debating literary and legal theory, and the inevitable conflicts between the two; we’ve cooked and consumed innumerable pounds of shrimp; we’ve run around this city, New York, that we’re all pretty new to and that they, with their boundless inclusiveness and kindness and enthusiasm, have made for into a place of both comfort and of endless exploration. They’ve dragged me to Queens for the best Thai food in the city, to Brooklyn for the best Afghani food in the city, to the boardwalk on Coney Island on Easter Sunday, to museums and galleries – always on the last day of any given exhibit, of course, like good New Yorkers. We’ve discussed the complexities and joys of family, friendship, and love – as well as where to get the best ice cream and fried chicken in Morningside Heights.

As Reverend [W] mentioned so eloquently in the lovely ceremony this evening, this is a particularly vexed and interesting and powerful moment at which to get married – when the right of some people to do so is an object of such struggle, when the denial of that right is being used by other people to such personally and politically violent ends. [C] and [T], as fully as I can imagine anyone doing, are getting married in the midst of all of this in a way that is both ethical and intimate, both thoughtful and joyous. I think that, just as they are made better and stronger and more beautiful by being married, and thus being a part of each other, marriage itself, as an institution, is made better and stronger, more just and more promising, by their being a part of it. I’m so grateful to have the chance to watch what they do with it, as they make it their own and do what they can to also make it that of anyone, of any gender or sexuality, who wants it or needs it.

To [C] and [T] --

I just went out to get beer, and one of the regular homeless guys on my block stopped me and said, "Hey, miss, can you help me get some food? I haven't had anything to eat since 7:30!"

That has got to be the most ineffective appeal of all time. Who the fuck has eaten since 7:30??

I guess I shouldn't make fun of homeless people especially when it's five thousand degrees out...but it was funny.

everyone should watch

the clip below from the Tyra Banks Show's episode "Women Who Love Gay Men." Well, at least everyone interested in pop culture, subcultures, gender and sexuality, supermodels, and any of the intersections between these things. Or just weird funny shit. Which is pretty much everyone, or at least everyone reading this blog, I would imagine, so yeah: everyone should watch this!

You should know that the two women Tyra is interviewing identify themselves, actually, not as "women who love gay men" or as "gay men trapped in women's bodies," but as "girlfags". One of the terms which, of course, they weren't allowed to say on the family-friendly network TV air. Girlfags are...; well, let's ask them:

Q: What is a girlfag?
A: A woman who is very attracted to gay/bi men. She may (or may not) also feel she is (fully or partly) a "gay man in a woman's body". Many girlfags consider themselves to be genderqueer. Girlfags may identify primarily as bi or straight or lesbian, and are often attracted to more types of people than just gay/bi men.

[Go "here" for more FAQs.]



Check out this clip on MedicineFilms.com!

Pretty amazing, right? Has anyone ever looked so utterly perplexed as Tyra Banks facing the idea that there are people - and people who might not look like supermodels but who are attractive and articulate and friendly and seem pretty damn "normal" - whose identities and desires exceed conventional categories; except maybe her studio audience?

I remember the first time I came across this "girlfags" thing: it was maybe three years ago, and I was having some kind of collegiate crisis of identification, immersed in my first round of introduction to queer theory, troubled - or exhilarated - by the fact that my relationship with my gay best friend was more intense, more emotionally absorbing, perhaps even more erotically charged, than my relationship with my boyfriend ever was (and it just so happened that my gay best friend was my [ex]-boyfriend's roommate, which added some peculiar convolution to the whole thing); troubled by my own apparent heterosexual orientation that seemed to clash irreducably with an incipient identification with "queerness"; spending a lot of time hanging out with gay boys and going to gay clubs but feeling alienated from and distressed by the limiting and unevocative label of "fag hag" - a label frequently attached to me by various acquaintances, some well-meaning and loving and some malicious and bitchy - because of all the profoundly unattractive qualities it almost
inevitably ascribes to gay men, straight women, and the relationships between them (is there anything more annoying than your mother, as well as innumerable magazines and other pop media outlets, saying, "Oh, a gay friend? that's great...it's so easy and fun!" and all that shit about shopping and gossiping and blah blah blah and "no sexual tension!!")...anyway. I did what anyone else would do when faced with such issues - I googled - and someone I ended up at the embarassingly oldschool and apparently defunct, yet nonetheless rather inspiring, girlfags.com, where I found that "A girlfag differs from a fag hag in that she doesn't want her relationship to be "safe"; she is interested in a romantic or sexual relationship with a gay or bi man...", and I thought, that kind of resonates...

So, if I were someone who was a little more into subcultural identifications, or maybe, if I had been a little younger at that point - or, let's be honest, if the girlfags I could find pictures of didn't all look kind of unattractive (I know, I'm a bitch) - I would probably have grabbed right onto that title and that little group, probably signed up for the listserv and started posting on the message boards and going to gatherings, if there were any. I didn't know...maybe, after all, it's just that I'm lazy. I always had the term there, though, sort of in the back of my mind, and once in a while remembered it more vividly and wondered if maybe after all it might not be the best way to describe something that, as time went by, I started to feel both more strongly and more complexly...and then I saw the Tyra show clip, and I gained not only a new expressive gesture to talk about gay dudes (if you missed the finger-snapping "that kind!" thing, go back and watch again, please) but a new appreciation for the self-identified girlfags, who I think are pretty cute and say some smart stuff and hold up pretty well under all of that shit that they're getting from Tyra and the audience; and they manage to make a few people, maybe, think about gender and sexuality in a less absurdly simplistic way than they might have otherwise, which is a project I deeply admire.

---

Then, I had sex with a gay guy. Last week. I don't mean a "straight" guy who all your friends say will probably be coming out by the end of the year. I don't even mean a guy who sleeps mostly with girls but fools around with guys sometimes if things go that way. I don't even mean - though I do like them very much - an openly bisexual or "heteroflexible" (that's what [B.] called himself the first time I met him, and I fell in love with him a little bit right then) guy who sleeps with boys and girls and/or people of any other gender. I mean a gay boy; a gay gay gay gay boy.
Like, a boy who came out in his sophomore year of college - nine years ago - and hasn't slept with a girl since then. A boy who very regularly has anal sex with other boys. A boy who has an unmissably and insistently "gay" affect and manner of dress and manner of speech; a boy who is six feet tall and 150lbs, with every square inch of his body tanned and toned to absolute golden perfection, and who could lift me up off the ground with one arm because.

He posted on craigslist: "I'm a gay guy who is curious to see if he'd be any good in bed with a woman. Hoping there's a straight or gay girl who wants to hang out." And I wrote back, thinking "pick me! pick me!", "hey, I'm a (mostly) straight girl who is really into gay/bi guys, sexually and just hanging out...sounds like we could have fun..." And I hoped and hoped that he'd write back, and that he was real - I forgot to mention, also, that he included, with his ad, two photos of him nude on the beach, looking glorious and much more like a gay porn star than like someone you could possibly meet on craiglist - because this was really, exactly what I had been hoping to come across ever since realizing, over the past few months and with especial force this last visit to SF, in June, just how focused my sexuality is, these days, on boys who like other boys.

Amazingly, sort of unbelievably, it worked out. He apparently, amazingly, thought that my photos were cute, too. So we met, on Friday night two weeks ago, at Duplex, a piano bar in the West Village - on Christopher Street - which was an interesting and delightful choice for this particular engagement, since it's one of the more gay of the possible meeting spots in NYC. I guess he didn't want there to be any doubt about the level of his gayness; towards the beginning of our date, when I said something about having been with bi guys, he intercepted, quickly, "Well, you really should know that bi is very different than gay." (Yes, I do know that, but thanks, I'll keep it in mind...)

I think - well, I know - that we were both more than a little nervous. We had fun, talking, nonetheless; and we drank enough vodka to, as he said the next morning, "drown the Russian army." He tried to explain what made him want to do this: "I've never been one of those gay guys who's disgusted by girls, and, you know, I think that I'm pretty good in bed with guys, and I guess I'd just been wondering if I'd be any good with a girl"; and I tried to explain what made me want to do this: "I don't know, I mean, I kind of can't stand most straight guys, and I also kind of can't stand identifying with a lot of the conventions of being a woman or whatever, but I'm not a lesbian, I really really like boys, so yeah, I guess I feel like my sexuality is really kind of directed towards gay guys." I realized, at some point, that someone like me - whose identification as a "woman" is tenuous and hostile at best, who doesn't have big boobs and long hair and who can't do things like give "instructions" - might not actually be what he had in mind; but at that point, it was too late, and he seemed, still, to think I was cute.

So we drank and we drank, and we listened to the bartenders, who are also all Broadway actors of one degree of success or another, sing their ballads and make gentle fun of the group of nice tourist girls from Chicago; and both of us kept saying that we couldn't quite figure out how to act - I kept screwing up, saying things about "dating," by which I didn't mean, like, dating, but he apparently thought that I did, and would rush in with, "Well, I'm not going to date you!", which was a little embarrassing - but we just drank and drakn some more until finally he said, "Let's go get naked." And we left.

(On the way out, he said, "I wasn't sure if it was ok to say that, you know, to a girl.."
And I said, "It's ok!"
And he said, "Good...of course I would have been much more direct with a guy."
"What would you say?"
"Let's go fuck."
"It's ok, you could say that to me!"
"Ok...let's go fuck!"
[LOL])

We jumped in a cab, and we went to Brooklyn, to his apartment - the first time I've been to Brooklyn in this sort of situation in quite a while - which turned out to be large and cool and decorously furnished with matching, minimalist one-step-up-from-Ikea stuff; black, and beige, with tiny framed artwork, and candles. There wasn't too much time from the moment we sat down on his couch to the moment he kissed me. (I felt bad, because I think that, in some sense, I was supposed to be the "aggressor" - I was supposed to be, like, showing him the way, giving directions, that kind of thing. The kind of thing of which I am utterly incapable. So I just didn't; I just let him do it; and he did it.)

We kissed, and then our shirts came off, and then we moved into the bedroom - the bed was big, and soft, with a fluffy white comforter and about two hundred pillow ("I'm a pillow whore," he said) - and he threw me down on it. He was really strong; and he was really all over me. If I had entered my own consciousness (does this make any sense?) at the moment at which he pulled off my jeans and started to, you know, do things, I never ever would have believed that this was a gaygaygay guy tentatively embarking on his first hookup with a female-anatomied person in almost ten years. He was eager, and confident, and way into it; and he was fucking skilled. I, too, was tremendously into it; I could hardly breathe. He pinned me down to the bed, all of those pillows falling all around my head, and he fucked me. He didn't seem freaked out, he didn't seem hesitant, he didn't seem repulsed. He was hard and he stayed hard; he was more sexually funtional, in both the most obvious and less obvious senses of that expression, than a whole lot of the ostensibly "straight" boys I've fucked in the past year.

([M.] and I have been talking, for the past few weeks, about how there seems to be an anti-oral-sex trend going on among the gays, as well as among the straights-who-are-kinda-gay - i.e. [B.], who forbids anyone's mouth to go anywhere near his dick. In case it's of any interest to any segment of the population, I'm happy to report that this trend seems to be maintained even among gays who decide to have sex with girls.)

So yes, we had sex. I couldn't quite ever believe it was really happening; I kept thinking about - he kept talking about - all of the boys that he had fucked, right there, in that bed - and that was hot. He said it felt good. I know it felt good. He came really quickly, so I guess it did feel good - or, he just wanted to get it over with - or both; who knows.

He said, "Wow, well, that was an experience!"
I said, "I hope you enjoyed it!"
"I hope you enjoyed it."
"Oh, yeah, I definitely did, don't worry about that!"
"Well good, I did too," he said, and rolled over and kissed me again and then before I knew it we were fucking again.

He said, "Can I come on you?"
I said, "Yes...come on me..."
He came; all over me. And said, and kissed me, "You'll be all sticky."
I laughed and I said, "It's ok, I love that. I love it when people come on my face."
He said, "Yeah, that's always hot."
"Except it can be kind of dangerous..."
"If they don't aim well."
"Yeah, you know, when it, like, gets in your eye. And you're like, that was hot, but then ten minutes later you realize you've been blinded."
"I know! And then you're frantically washing your eye out..."
"And it gets, like, all red and gross..."
"I got on a plane from San Franicsco to New York like that once."
We laughed; I loved it, having that conversation, about other boys ejaculating on us, with a boy who had just ejaculated all over me.

Then, after we had lain there happily (or I, at least, was happy; happy with that fleeting yet - truly - real satisfaction of a one-night stand) for a few minutes, he said, "You're welcome to stay, of course, but I do have get up at 10 am." (He was going to volunteer at the LGBT Center, of all things.) It took me a few minutes to figure out that he was probably hint, not even so subtly, that I should leave. But it was 4am, and I didn't feel like making my way back home - I was in fucking Brooklyn - so I elected not to take the hint.

In the morning, though, I got into trouble again, with the not taking hints. In the morning I realized, at some point, that there was a different code of speech and behavior and implication and assumption going on here that I didn't quite have a handle on. We woke up, and we had sex - I was shocked by that; we were, after all, sober - and then he said, "Well, I have to get up and shower, and leave soon," and I smiled, sleepy, satisfied, and rolled over and went back to sleep. And I realized when he woke me up again an hour later and said, again, "Well, I have to leave soon!" that probably I was supposed to get up and get out of there the first time. But even then I still didn't get it: I went out to the living room, and collected my clothes and put them on, and then sat down. And he said, "So you know how to get home?"

And - this is embarassing - I was about to say, "Well, you're going the same direction as me, right?" Because he was; and because I've been on so many dates were the boy has to be somewhere in the morning and we just leave together. Fortunately, I caught myself, and said, only a little awkwardly, "Well, you'r...yeah, I do." Now, I wouldn't say that this is some exclusively binaristic gay/straight kind of thing, that gays kick you out before they have to leave and straights leave with you, and I certainly wouldn't say that the latter is, like, nicer than the former, or anything like that. What I was thinking, as I left - left quite happily - was that there was a certain professionalism about this; a certain expected sequence. I was thinking that most of the "straight" boys at whose apartments I have ended up under these kind of conditions have always seemed sort of clueless, sort of surprised by it, sort of awkward and nervous and a little bit self-satisfied that I was there and a little bit angry that I was there. And what it all added up to was that, though they might have really, really wanted to (might even have tried to), there was no way they would have been able to tell me to leave so that they could get ready to go wherever they had to go in peace (which is, after all, I think what most of us want to do when we wake up and realize there's someone we don't really know in the bed). But with this guy, it was different; it was like there was a way things were supposed to go, and everyone knew it (or was supposed to know it; I apparently had forgotten), and that was all good. When I finally caught on and got out of there, we parted with a kiss, a "well thanks, I had fun!," a smile and a little giggle; no annoying pretense of "well, I'll call..." (yeah, right); it was friendly and honest, and it was kind of sweet, too.

The thing is, looking back on it, I should have known exactly how it would play; I should have been playing along with more skill. Throughout the whole date, actually, I had been thinking: "Am I acting like a gay boy would act? Am I flirting like [M.] would flirt?" And I had to admit that I wasn't, at all. And I wasn't sure why.

I wondered, as I left the building and headed to the subway and then decided to go get coffee and a muffin (I was starving) in one of those cute Brooklyn coffeeshops that they don't really have in Manhattan, how the night that I shared with this guy played out differently - and, of course, I don't just mean in terms of there being a some different anatomical arrangements involved; though that, too - than a night shared by him and another guy would be; and I wondered also what were the valences of difference between this interaction and those others that I've had with gay guys throughout my life, and if this one changed those at all.

Anyway, it was pretty exciting to think that I'd had sex with a gay guy - three time! and it was good!; and I wondered if maybe I shouldn't call up the Tyra Banks show and offer my input.